Link valuation is a difficult subject to quantify. Most SEO’s will tell you that coming up with a value of a text link is a “gut feel”, which really doesn’t help much when you are deciding to drop hundreds or thousands per month on a text link ad that doesn’t often show a completely direct correlation with your web site rankings.
Questions to ask when purchasing about the quality and value of a link
1. What is the value of the theme?
(ie: Is it a high competition/ highly monetized industry such as pharmaceauticals, gambling, or finance?)
2. What is the overall power of the link?
(ie: Is it helping any other sites to rank high? How links from unique C-class IP addresses does it have?)
3. What is the linking neighborhood theme of the site linking to you?
(ie, The “Topic” of the links that link to that site. – and a comparision of how close of a “linking neighborhood” is to your site’s theme.)
4. How many outbound links are on the page giving the link, and who else do they link to?
(Lower the better and quality counts – skip the site with poker plastered all over it.)
5. What is the format of the link, how many characters for anchor text and description do you get, and do you have control to change it?
(Footer Link? Sidebar link? Run of site? Body text link? Pre-sell page?)
6. Where is the link deriving it’s power?
(Does it have any .edus or .govs linking to it? How many unique domains and C class IP addresses?)
7. What is the age of the site?
(older the better)
8. Will the link pass any direct clickthrough traffic?
(Alexa is a litmus test here)
9. How many pages will the link be placed on?
(Don’t go overboard with run of site links now)
10. Will the link go to a subsection of your site or your homepage?
(Help your deep link ratio)
11. Does the link “pass power”?
This is where the “gut feel” comes in. If a link is not passing any power, it is potentially worthless. It’s no fun flushing money away, so develop an intuition for when a link is passing it’s value and when it isn’t.
A Few More Link Buying Resources –
In order to answer most of these questions, find some good link building tools to analyze backlink data. Happy link hunting!
Todd Malicoat aka Stuntdubl made his first horrible looking website full of animated .gifs in 1997, and after fours years of failure and experimentation ended up in the world of SEO and internet marketing in early 2001. He is currently an independent marketing consultant from the SEO school of thought. Todd earned a bachelors of business adminstration from Northwood University in 2003 while running an web design and consulting firm Meta4creations, LLC. Todd is a speaker at both Webmasterworld and Search Engine Strategies conferences.
